The Family Filmgoer

April 8, 2005|By Jane Horwitz

Beauty Shop

(PG-13, 105 min.)

Beauty Shop proves nearly as entertaining and audience-friendly as a female-focused spinoff of the Barber Shop films (Barbershop and Barbershop 2: Back in Business, 2002 and 2004, both PG-13s). By now the concept seems a tad watered-down and sitcomish, but it is a pleasant enough diversion for high-schoolers, with an amiable message about embracing diversity.

Queen Latifah brings her tough-but-tender persona to the lead, softer than Ice Cube's in the earlier films, but similar. Stylists and customers in Beauty Shop talk a lot of trash, though, making the film iffy for middle-schoolers. The dialogue includes strong sexual innuendo that occasionally goes beyond hinting and into explicit sexual slang and discussion of sex practices and sex organs. The script features occasional profanity and gay humor, some of it homophobic.

Sin City

(R, 126 min.)

With its tough-talking, bullet-eating, skull-smashing, sexy, film noir-ish crime stories, Frank Miller's Sin City will thrill fans of the graphic novels on which it is based. Taken from three of Miller's Sin City tales, the movie paints ravishing pictures, designed by director Robert Rodriguez and Miller, who co-directed, to look as much like the graphic novels as possible. It was shot on high-definition video with live actors enveloped in an artificial world of digital effects -- black-and-white, but with sudden splashes of surreal color. Yet along with its groundbreaking look, pitch-perfect performances and great retro dialogue, this is an intensely violent, even sadistic film that objectifies women and glorifies gore. It would be irresponsible to recommend it for anyone younger than 17.

The three separate stories deal with a criminal who rapes and murders young girls (we see a terrified little girl held captive), a well-connected murderer of prostitutes who cannibalizes his victims, and a war between Sin City's leather-clad, gun-toting prostitutes and crooked cops. The violence may be ultra-stylized and the blood white, but it feels real. We see heads and limbs lopped off, point-blank shootings, and, it is strongly implied, though not graphically shown, men's privates mutilated. Sin City has one explicit sexual situation, other sexual innuendo, much seminudity (toplessness, bare derrieres), profanity and drinking.

Each antihero narrates his own tale. Bruce Willis plays Hartigan, an aging cop who rescues a girl from the child killer. His story resumes after she grows up (played by Jessica Alba). Mickey Rourke plays Marv, a hatchet-faced ex-con who awakes to find the pretty girl he slept with murdered. He hacks his way toward the culprit. Clive Owen plays Dwight, who saves a waitress (Brittany Murphy) from her abusive ex (Benicio Del Toro), then helps Sin City's prostitutes (led by Rosario Dawson) battle crooked cops.

Ice Princess (G) Sanitized, family-friendly high school fable geared to grade-schoolers earns credibility from strong cast. A sweet physics whiz (Michelle Trachtenberg) studies the aerodynamics of figure skating for a physics project and suddenly burns to become a serious competitive skater. Her feminist, idealistic mom (Joan Cusack), who wants her to go to Harvard, is crushed. Her tough-minded coach (Kim Cattrall) wishes her own flighty daughter had the same drive. Understated sexual innuendo.

The Pacifier (PG) Vin Diesel flexes his clumsy but willing comedy muscles in contrived but often amusing tale of a Navy SEAL sent to protect five kids after their dad, a government scientist, is murdered. They don't want military rules and he knows no other way, plus he's never changed a diaper. Toilet humor, sexual innuendo, mild profanity, Nazi armband whose meaning is never explained at a kid's level, bloodless gunplay, martial arts fights, kids briefly put in jeopardy.